Holtz Center Brown Bag Series

Pablo Gomez analyzes how a group of seventeenth-century slave traders, physicians, financiers and royal functionaries in Europe, Africa and the New World created the slave exchange body unit known as the “pieza de Indias.” The Pieza de Indias determined the value and fate of millions of Africans over roughly two centuries. Few other contemporary developments in the ideation of the body had a larger impact on the lives of so many people across the Atlantic world.